devalier

Well I certainly would wish that the entire issue of the racial test score gap would be dropped. We should only worry about treating individuals based on who they are as individuals, and that does not require using statistics broken down by race.

But the racial test score gap is a huge issue, and blame does get assigned, and action is taken based on that blame. So if I am in a conversation and someone says, "Well if you don't think schools/culture/racism/poverty causes the gap, what does?", then I'm going to give my honest opinion. If that explanation includes genes, then am I a racist bigot who should be ostracized from polite society?

No it does not. For it is not at all defined what it means to view "black people as inferior".

For instance, it is a fact about the world that across a vast number of tests of cognitive ability -- SAT's, NAEP, LSAT's, AFQT, IQ tests, etc, -- the average score among blacks is about a standard deviation lower than the average among whites. This is not controversial, I read articles in the NY Times all the time about closing the test score gap. If I believe have read evidence that convinces me that 1% of that gap is due to differences in gene frequency between the races, am I a racist who believes that "black people are inferior"? What if I believe that genes explain 10% of the gap? 50%? 100%? At what percentage am I an evil bigot who should be excluded from polite society?

Yes. And ironically, the one who convinced me of that point is Yarvin/Moldbug. (He actually argued, partly tongue-and-cheek, that Egypt should shut off its internet from the world. And while this sounds outrageous and terrible, remember that he was right about the revolutions in the Arab world, and virtually everyone in the tech world who cheered on the revolutions were wrong).

I think it is fine that some speech is considered beyond the pale. Some speech is in fact dangerous. Power comes from the barrel of the gun -- but speech is used to organize the gun holders. Speech tells the people with the guns who the bad guys are.

My problem is that the wrong people are controlling speech, and for the wrong reasons. De-platforming is being instigated via a heckler's veto -- the biggest cry-bullies try to dictate what is acceptable. I'd rather have speech controlled by an official council selected by a random lottery of citizens, than by self-appointed censors.

And also I don't agree with banning Yarvin/Moldbug in particular. I have found Yarvin/Moldbug to be an amazingly insightful and interesting blogger. The history and sources he has cited has greatly enhanced my understanding of the world. Sometimes he can be abrasive, hyperbolic or a troll, but overall I am better off for having read him. I hate it that I'm scared in real life to mention that I have read his material. I'd rather see him inside the Overton window of conversation.

But the worst aspect of the current attempt to deplatform, is that the line of what is acceptable is constantly changing. If I say "it's silly that someone with male equipment be allowed to use a women's bathroom", does that make me transphobic? Should I be banned from conferences? What about five years from now, when the line has moved? And what belief that is normal now, will be unacceptable in twenty years?

It seems to me you could divide African history into several phases:

1. Pre-Colonialism 2. Era of conquest, enslavement, and plunder (1500s-1900) 3. High Colonialism (c1920-1960) 4. Rule by Cathedral (ie, nominal rule by Africans, but with massive meddling by NGOs, academic experts, leftist activists, and the US State Department)

I took classes on this in college, followed this debate over time, and read many Moldbug cited materials. It seems to me quite clear that era 3 was better for Africans than era 1 and era 4. What Moldbug de-emphasizes in those debates is that era 2 was probably the worst of all. And I think it is ok to criticize him for his lack of emphasis to that point.

However, I think he is right to be upset over the denial that era 3 was better than era 4. Or if it is admitted, the blame always goes the colonialists for not preparing the people for independence, or the blame goes to the CIA, or the blame goes to companies that still maintained a presence in Africa. Never is it admitted that Cathedral meddling has had a massively bad influence.

It seems obvious to me that in the countries of the Congo, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the Ivory Coast, that replacing the prior system (which was either colonial rule, limited suffrage) with an attempt at universal suffrage democracy, resulted in massive destabilization and those countries much more violent, and made them materially worse off (I list these because I have actually looked into their history, the same is probably true of the other countries, but I am less sure). Yet it is completely forbidden to make this argument in academia or any establishment media. On this point, Moldbug is very much in the right, and the official point of view is wrong.

IQ tests are designed to be excellent proxies for what we generally understand to be intelligence. They can be better or worse proxies depending on the circumstance. In the particular case of testing black Americans, the IQ tests are quite predictive, and the world looks like what we would expect, if the tests were indeed actually testing intelligence. What is your evidence that IQ tests are poor proxies in the case of testing African-Americans?

A great deal of data seems to show that IQ still is very predictive, even when accounting for socio-economic status. That is exactly what they were originally designed for. SAT tests for instance were designed to find students from poorer and more marginalized backgrounds who nonetheless were still very smart and could achieve if given the chance. This is all covered in the Bell Curve, and well some professors thought that Murray exaggerated the degree of certainty, no one showed that his data was false, nor that the conclusion was false.

Believe it or not, I used to be much more in your camp, but after reading a bunch of sources, including the Bell Curve, Gould's the Mismeasure of Man, dozens of papers from scientists contesting the Bell Curve, responses to those papers, and so on, I came to the conclusions I did. Personally, I would much prefer if the evidence had said otherwise. I don't like being called a racist asshat. But given the evidence is what it is, I don't think it is fair to accuse Silicon Valley of judging people by race over merit, simply based on hiring statistics.

race is not accepted as a biological handicap

That's not an accurate phrasing of my view. If a black person has a 130IQ, they have a 130IQ and their race is not a handicap. No person should view their race as a handicap, or be personally stereotyped based on their race. It is just statistically less likely that a black person has a 130IQ. And that was what the original charge was based on -- the statistical underrepresentation of black people in Silicon Valley.

And yeah, I understand that my particular account has an ideological bent to it. I wish one account could fully represent who I am. But I am a active HN member with a long history of posts on all sorts of issues. But for obvious reasons, in cases where I believe the truth is highly politically incorrect, I have to post on a different account. I do try to respect the spirit of the guidelines, but I am not sure what I should do differently going forward.